Garshasp: The Monster Slayer Review

David Brown grunts, sweats and presses E a hell of a lot in Garshasp: The Monster Slayer

Garshasp the Monster Slayer is rubbish. Actually, that’s not entirely fair, it’s probably just not very good. Or perhaps it’s mediocre. It depends on how forgiving you’re willing to be, you see. It’s quite possible to veer between all three of these emotional responses to Dead Mage’s new indie mythical hack-and-slasher, often within the space of a couple of minutes.

Before we address just what makes Garshasp such a blindingly infuriating experience, some general housekeeping needs to be done. Set in a surprisingly well researched version of mythical Persia, with all sorts of accurate (and perplexing) names to be bombarded by.

When not fighting, Garshasp enjoys nothing more than catching a few rays

The general flow of things is that you walk forward a bit, fight some enemies that appear out of nowhere, move on a bit more, fight some more, and repeat ad nauseum. Occasionally there’s a lever to pull, a lift to ride or a wall to slide down, but essentially you’ll be just moving from fight to fight for the entirety of the game. If you can handle getting anywhere near that far.

Because you might just have torn your own throat out in rage way before you see the finish line. The obvious inspiration for Garshasp, in gameplay as well as setting terms, is the God of War series and it’s from here that it takes the concept of not allowing the player to control the camera, preferring to force you to view the action from a certain perspective depending on the exact place you find yourself in the world.

Lo and behold, you find yourself having to make leaps of faith because the next bit of the level is partially (or sometimes totally) hidden by the camera angle. Or perhaps it’s just slightly off when you’re trying to climb up a spiral set of platforms, meaning that instead of jumping onto the next one, you misjudge the direction and plummet to your death.

Or it flips suddenly meaning you start walking in the opposite direction for a second, which can again lead to you just tumbling off the side of a ledge. Some of these ledges have invisible walls to prevent this, but not all of them.

When the camera’s working and in the right place, some of the vistas can look genuinely impressive for an independent release.The combat, though, is never impressive. Most of the time it’s hopelessly repetitive, with a large number of the battles being winnable by pressing the E key and performing an automatic kill.

Garshasp also enjoys a spot of logrolling in his spare time...

Some more powerful enemies require a quick QTE after the E key has been pressed, while the boss battles are tedious, involving chipping away at the legs of the creature/foe before pressing E and doing a longer QTE. Incidentally, the QTEs can be initially confusing. The symbols appear at the extremities of the screen, all with the same symbol and indicating you’re meant to press the directional key that corresponds with where it is. So if it appears on the left, press left and so on. Except you won’t know this, and your correspondent only found out after looking at a forum. Anyway, there are combos and hints at a more sophisticated combat system, but really, block and E, that’s all you’ll really need. Shift to dodge as well.

This is why how forgiving you are when playing is important here. If you’re in a good mood, then you could probably (partially) overlook the chronic repetition and tic-inducing frustration. You could probably just brush them aside and get some enjoyment out of seeing hundreds of enemies get chopped to bits with your blades.

But if you’re not in a good mood, or if you’re not feeling particularly generous, it’s possible to utterly despise Garshasp. You won’t give it the benefit of the doubt because it’s made by an indie team, because its problems aren’t budget-related, but are fundamental parts of the game’s design that don’t get any better the more money you throw at them. 10 quid or 10 million quid, it doesn’t matter how big the budget is, the camera will always shit on you from a great height if you have no control over it. It might work in God of War, but it doesn’t here.

Likewise the combat with its overly simplistic nature and ultimate repetition. Yes, have loads of enemies to kill, that’s fine. Just make them more exciting to kill, make bosses more interesting, that sort of thing.

...but what he really, really loves is pressing E to insta-kill enemies

And make your checkpoints less terrible too. Nobody wants to go back to before the cut-scene if they do die during a more challenging fight. It’s not as crippling an issue as it is in a lot of games, but sometimes they do throw you back a bit too far.

All of this must make you think your correspondent here really, really hated Garshasp, and to an extent you’d be correct. Sometimes though, forgiveness does rear its unexpected head and Garshasp can appear less than hateful. On a good day, it’s even approaching mediocre or average. Then you fall into the swamp because the killing animation took you over the edge of your small raft and you die instantly. Sigh.

GARSHASP: THE MONSTER SLAYER VERDICT

All of this must make you think your correspondent here really, really hated Garshasp, and to an extent you’d be correct. Sometimes though, forgiveness does rear its unexpected head and Garshasp can appear less than hateful. On a good day, it’s even approaching mediocre or average. Then you fall into the swamp because the killing animation took you over the edge of your small raft and you die instantly. Sigh.